FT 

MEADE 

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407 

Copy 1 


lity College (Durham) Publications. 

No. 6. Price 25 Cents, Prepaid. 

Political and Social Science Series. 


Edited by John Franklin Crowell* 


. . . Taxation 

in 


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MAR 



The American Colonies : 


The Colony of New Jersey, 


By 


John Franklin Crowell, A. B., Dr. Litt.» 


President of Trinity College, Durham, 
and Professor of Social Science* 




Trinity College Press, 
Durham, North Carolina. 

1893. 


♦ 



GIFT 

MRS. WOODROW WILSON 
NOV. 25, 1 939 

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Announcement. 

The successive numbers of the Political and Social 
Science Series of Publications by Trinity College, Dur- 
ham, (N. C.), will appear at intervals of two months 
(six numbers a year) or oftener, under the editorial di- 
rection of John Franklin Crowell, President and Profes- 
sor of Social Science. 

i * 

This publication (No. 6) is the first of a series entitled 
‘ Taxation in the American Colonies consisting of thir- 
teen distinct studies already arranged for and now in 
process of preparation. The combined numbers are to 
constitute a critical study of the fiscal administration of 
these colonies up to the end of their colonial existence. 
The other numbers are in preparation and will be 
issued as early as practicable in uniform size. 


"N 

yC? 


Taxation in the American Colonies. 


Among the numerous phases of colonial history yet 
to be studied, none would seem more dry and uninter- 
esting to the general reader than that of taxation. 
Though it may not be in itself at all fascinating as his- 
tory of a dead past, yet the fiscal economy of any new 
social beginnings under unique circumstances is always 
so closely connected with their civil and domestic de- 
velopments, that if treated in its real relations the sub- 
ject of taxation must throw much light upon, and put 
new meaning into, the history of such communities. 

The watchword of early colonial resistance was the 
cardinal maxim of taxation: no taxation without repre- 
sentation ! But back of that dominant idea, at the be- 
ginning of the revolutionary period, there is a century 
and a half of progressive development, during which 
this principle became as a rule of practice a part of the 
living texture of the colonial bodies politic. It is the 
purpose here to trace the steps of expansion in the the- 
ory and methods of taxation during this period, to show 
how their growth is possibly the initial phase of the 
growth of self-government — that too, which rendered 
the Revolution not merely possible, but quite inevita- 
ble. Taxation is the first and the last problem of gov- 
ernment. 


Taxation in New Jersey Colony. 


The original grant of King Charles II in 1663 to his 
“dearest Brother James, Duke of York,” comprehended 
New England and the tract lying between the Connect- 
icut and the Delaware rivers, to all the revenues of 
which the Duke was thereby entitled in return for an 
annual installment of forty beaver skins to his most 
gracious sovereign. 

Little more than a year later a sub-grant was made 
by the Duke to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Car- 
teret of the territory then named and thereafter known 
as New Jersey, “under the rent of a peper corn” and 
“twenty Nobles of lawful money of England” annu- 
ally. To the colonists who ventured forth to this new 
Mesopotamia these joint proprietors granted in turn the 
form of government know as the “concessions.” In 
name and nature they were attractive inducements to 
any one seeking a new home in the new world. The 
liberal terms on which political freedom and possession 
of land were offered to bond and free alike drew hither 
not only new emigrations from England and the conti- 
nent, but likewise gave an impulse quite alarming in 
its extent to migration from the more uncongenial so- 
ciety of the sister colonies. 

In nothing, however, was the document of “conces- 
sions” more explicit than on the subject of taxation. 
Conspicuous among the positively defined powers of the 
Assembly of the province is the one ‘ ‘to lay equal taxes 
and Assessments, equally to raise Moneys or Goods upon 
all Lands (except the Lands of us the Lords Proprietors 
before settling,) or persons within the several precincts, 
Hundreds, Parishes, Manors or whatsoever other Divis- 
ions shall hereafter be made and established in the said 
province, as oft as necessity shall require, and in such 
manner as to them shall seem most equal and easy for 
the said Inhabitants; in order to the better supporting 


— 6 — 


of the public charge of the said Government, and for 
the mutual Safety, Defence and Security of the said 
Province. 1 ’ 

This clause, besides locating and specifying the ex- 
ercise of the taxing power, connects with this idea the 
division of the province into districts which in time 
would be necessitated, as expansion continued, by the 
division of the labor of collecting the levies imposed. 
We find thus that the multiplication of local divisions 
and thus of local governments, so to speak, go hand in 
hand in the history of provincial growth: out of the ne- 
cessities of taxation the number of sub-divisions in- 
creases, each of which becomes a more or less complete 
integral of self-government. 

While the Assembly is the natural guardian of the 
people’s rights on this matter, it is made the special 
duty of the governor of the province to see that lands 
and property for public use be exempt from all taxes or 
charges of any kind. 

It was four years after the founding of the colony that 
the first tax of £$o was “levied upon the country for 
the defraying of public charges, and this rate equally 
proportioned to each Town. That is to say Five Pounds 
to each Town to be paid in the manner as followeth : 
Winter Wheat at Five Shillings a bushel, Summer 
Wheat at Four Shillings and Six-pence. Brese at 
Three Shillings and Six-Pence. Indian Corn at Three- 
Shillings. Rye at Four-Shillings. Barley at Four- 
Shillings. Beef at Two-pence Half-Penny. Pork at 
Three-pence Half-Penny a Pound.” The system of 
barter was therefore then in vogue: currency was not 
yet in use among the people. We have in this interest- 
ing enactment both the quotations of prices current in 
the grain and produce market of the times and a list of 
the staple articles of produce in the province. The 
burden of this tax was necessarily very light upon the 
flourishing communities of agriculturists, whose land 
in some places yielded forty-fold of wheat per acre.* 

Town governments always arise more readily than 
rural ones in the development of society. The closer 


*Smith, History of New Jersey, Chapter VII. 




interests require united action, and the towns of Mid- 
dleton and Shrewsbury, light as was this first levy upon 
them, persistently resisted its collection. In fact there 
was really no established system of collection as yet. 
At Elizabethtown there was a common treasury or 
store-house. The machinery of taxation was in its 
simplest form — from the tax-payer to the treasurer di- 
rect, who made disbursements as ordered by the keepers 
of the public purse — the Assembly. 

The system was as loose as it was simple: from the 
different towns these taxes in the form of commodities 
not easily transported had to be conveyed a distance of 
fifty miles and less to the treasury. 

This fact — the great distance and the impassable 
character of the line of travel, which does not deserve 
the name of roads, over which goods were conveyed on 
horseback almost exclusively perhaps — this was not the 
reason for the delinquency of the two towns mentioned. 
They had been founded by settlers from Western Tong 
Island, who crossed to the opposite coast and settled 
there, some even before the present proprietors had re- 
ceived their grant. They therefore regarded themselves 
as still independent of the central government, when 
that was set up later. Though they were represented 
in the provincial Assembly, they seemed to have re- 
garded it rather as a provincial conference than as the 
source of administrative power and legislation. The 
spirit of local government was strong in them, and they 
therefore feared any restrictions upon its exercise from 
external sources, especially on a question of taxation. 

At the next session of the Assembly an act was passed 
to force these towns to make good their arrears: two 
delegates acting in the double capacity of constables 
and conciliators were sent to collect the tax due, and to 
demand from the inhabitants a positive answer whether 
or not they would submit to the laws of the province 
under the proprietors, “upon which the Assembly would 
act accordingly.” The refusal of two out of six towns 
to pay their levies convinced the Assembly that the 
system needed further modification. 

The first step in this direction was taken in defining 


‘ 8 — 


more strictly the duties of the treasurer now just elected 
by the Assembly, “to take cognizance of the country’s 
charge and rates,” which in those days meant to take 
charge of a respectable produce exchange. 

Scarcely had this measure been passed, when the 
Council and the Assembly came to a rupture and both 
adjourned, leaving the province to itself for seven years, 
when they were first re-assembled. In the meantime, the 
towns were being strengthened and disciplined in the 
art of governing themselves. 

The division of the country into judicial districts in 
1675, gave to these local divisions an individuality, es- 
pecially since the Justices of these county courts were 
elected by the county. Each county was required to 
be levied upon for the support of its own courts. 

A quite minute tax-measure was now passed and only 
made possible of enforcement, because of the advance- 
ment in the organization of county government, through 
the courts now being established by the necessity of 
preserving peace and order among this litigious people. 

The substance of this second levy is peculiar in sev- 
eral respects: 1 It is a county , not a provincial tax. 
2 It is a land-tax, laid on the land of residents and 
non-residents as well as upon the persons, who use the 
commons or gather timber from the unoccupied or un- 
claimed forests. This is a unique bit of forest legisla- 
tion of which we have heard too little until more recent 
years in the different states of the Union. 3 It 
taxed non-freeholding tradesmen after having had a 
limited residence in the colony. With this measure 
was issued a new valuation of commodities returnable 
as taxes; the list was much longer than the previous 
one; the variety of its items indicates considerable ad- 
vancement in the number of agricultural products in 
the several intervening years. 

By this time the constable had become a regularly 
established official in the towns of the province. In 
the statutes of this period there now is to be noted this 
indication of local development. In him the central 
government has a means of carrying out its enactments 
relating to taxation — he is the official representative of 
the provincial treasurer in the local divisions. Accord- 


in g to two stailtes passed in 1675, his provincial duties 
are of a two-fold character: the rates levied are to be 
brought into the provincial treasury “for the effecting 
whereof the constable of each town within the province 
shall require the inhabitants to bring it into the place 
where he, the said constable shall appoint” Together 
with this he is given the power of executing a warrant 
against delinquent tax-payers.* 

The first part of this measure attributes, it is true, 
only a superintending or at least an advisory capacity 
to the constable. Small as this may seem, it is an en- 
tirely new development in the method of collecting 
taxes for the public charge. In the second of these two 
statutes, a somewhat anomalous state of affairs contrib- 
uted to extend and confirm the function of the consta- 
ble in this new line of administrative duties. The gov- 
ernor's salary — an irregular amount in the earlier years 
of the province — having been in arrears, the sum of 
^50 was allowed him from the treasury of the province; 
but this having proved empty it was enacted that the 
amount be raised by voluntary subscription “and 
the sums subscribed to be paid unto the constables of the 
respective towns .”f The state of good feeling and con- 
fidence under which this measure could even be hoped 
to be carried out, indicates the amount of local interest 
in the affairs of the Province. But this feeling proved 
to be overestimated, and the Assembly of the following 
year (1676) found it necessary to go still farther in its 
delegation of power to local officials. The constabulary 
had as yet no executive power to collect this authorized 
subscription: its duty was simply to facilitate, not to en- 
force, its collection by serving as consignee. 

By way of remedy for this defect, so constantly recur- 
ring in provincial administration, it was provided that 
there be “three men chosen in every town in the province , 
by the free-holders at the publication hereof, to take the 
subscriptions of these that are yet behind, and if it be 
not considerable the aforesaid selectmen , shall assess 
what they shall give in proportion to others of like 


^Learning and Spicer, Statutes of N. J., p. 104. 
fLeaming and Spicer, p. 104. 


IO 


condition and quality and destraint be made for the 
same (by the constable) if payment be denied.” 

In this enactment the board of assessors is the latest 
feature entirely new in the machinery of taxation. 
Thus from session to session almost every new tax meas- 
ure shows some steps of progress — a gradual evolution 
of a system in the most natural way possibly. The ne- 
cessities of the situations call out temporary exercises 
of special powers. And these special agencies of indi- 
viduals — mostly local and rarely if ever provincial — ex- 
ercised for a common purpose, are the unmistakable 
points of transition to a better defined organization. 
The absence of any doctrinaire legislation in this direc- 
tion gave the process ample scope to work itself out 
normally, speedily and unhindered. Only six months 
after the appointment of these three selectmen, when 
the rates for the governor’s salary came to be levied, 
the General Assembly by the same act combined the 
original duties of this board with the superintending and 
executive Junctions of the constable into a permanent 
official addition to the organization of the method of 
taxation throughout the province as far as towns were 
yet organized. For the first time the warrant author- 
izing the constable to proceed forcibly against delin- 
quent rate-payers is issued to him 1 from a justice of 
peace of the town to which the said constable belongeth. ’ ’ * 

This step put the source of authority, the power of 
execution, and the apportioning of the public provincial 
charges wdthin the compass of local jurisdiction: 
thereby each town became autonomous in respect to tax- 
ation . The gain to local government was therefore 
three-fold: i. The vesting of piovincial executive 
powers of such considerable importance in the same lo- 
cal official increased the strength and independence of 
the town governments. 2. The organization of a board 
of assessors, to be elected by local suffrage, for the ap- 
portionment of levies upon the inhabitants — a part 
previously done by the Assembly itself— entailed a cor- 
responding surrender of power on the part of the cen- 
tral government to the local governments. 3. The 


♦Reaming and Spicer, p. iip. 


IT — 


warrant for the forcible collection of overdue taxes is 
no longer issued by the Assembly or by the county 
courts as hitherto, but has an internal source — the jus* 
tice of the peace of the town to which the constable 
belongs. 

In no respect were these men more practical than in 
the wisdom with which they provided checks and bal- 
ances upon the operation of the different parts of the 
system. The recent improvements had the indirect 
effect of bringing internal or local co-operation and in- 
dividual security to the towns: such concessions might 
prove dangerous to the effective action of the provin- 
cial power Might they not result in an undue sense 
of independence on the part of the towns, especially 
since some of them even from the beginning were none 
too well affected towards proprietary interests? 

The act by which the constables ot the towns were 
empowered to collect the levy of the previous year had 
apparently not foreseen this possible difficulty. In a 
twelve-month it had become an actual source of embar- 
rassment. The responsibility of the local constabulary 
to the central government not having been defined, it 
became a part of the machinery of taxation, good in 
itself, but too far removed from the yet unlengthened 
arm of the central executive to serve it faithfully in the 
face of local apathy or adverse public feeling. 

I At the Autumn session of 1676, much of the public 

rate was still unpaid. Fortunately the Assembly was 
as quick to apply the remedy as to discern the cause. 
Not only was the difficulty with the rate-payers, but 
what had been collected in some places had never been 
delivered at the provincial treasury. Nothing was so 
well adapted to remedy the defect as the proviso which 
followed: “If the constable or constables of the said 
respective towns shall neglect to do and perform accord- 
ing to the premises, the marshall shall have power to 
seize upon the constable’s goods or chatties for the 
whole.”* 

This measure supplies the missing link in the sys- 
tem of township and county government by connecting 





*Iveaming and Spicer, p. ist. 


12 


and fixing the responsibility of the officials of the for- 
mer to those of the latter. The county authorities, of 
which the marshal was the chief executive until 1682, 
when this official was superseded by the sheriff, were 
constituted as yet by the Assembly so that through the 
marshal the connection of the local powers with the 
central was established in their true relations. What- 
ever changes are yet to be made must come in the way 
of expansion along this faintly traceable outline as 
the ground-work of the system of local government 
peculiar to the middle colonies of North America. But 
everything is yet to be done in the way of development 
and expansion: the towns do not yet include the out- 
lying rural population ; the rural township is still unor- 
ganized; the county has no individuality except in its 
executive and judiciary service to the central govern- 
ment, and its geographical limits are not defined. 

In 1682, New Jersey was divided into the divisions of 
East and West, the former part being therewith granted 
to twenty-four proprietors. I11 the East, which was 
what virtually constituted the settled portion of the 
province before the division, one of the first measures 
of Lawne’s administration was to divide the whole ter- 
ritory under his jurisdiction into four counties* for the 
better governing and settling of courts — a step neces- 
sitated by the growth in wealth and population. 

Though created originally for judiciary needs, it 
was not long before these new political divisions were 
made the basis of the distribution of the burdens of 
taxation. Self-government in the line of internal im- 
provements began to be realized in the counties: the 
justices of the peace, presiding at the quarter sessions 
of these county courts in 1682, were empowered by the 
Assembly “to make a rate or tax upon the inhabitants 
of each county for the building of highways, biidges, 
ferries and a county jail therein.” Their power extended 
to the appointment of collectors as well as treasurers of 
this new tax. It was on the whole a large and sudden 
lease of power, the exercise of which might be expected 
to go far in the way of giving to the inhabitants a sense 


/ 




*1,. arid S., p. 229, 


— ! 3 — 


of a share in their own government, in so far as ic 
conld be made operative. But this feeling was by no 
means strong. Though the towns themselves were fa- 
miliar with the art of governing themselves, and though 
the counties had defined boundaries, there were large 
rural districts more or less populous which were hardly 
aware of there being any public charges to bear. The 
county governments extending over so large an area as 
one-eighth of the whole of the colony of New Jersey 
could not possibly perform allotted functions in a satis- 
factory manner, especially in the laying and collecting 
of taxes. Its :enter was too remote to awaken in the 
outlying populations any other than an occasional in- 
terest in their political belongings. 

The first we hear of these districts is given in the 
provisions made for the deputy-governor’s salary.* 
We see the concentrated town-government expanding 
into that of the township in the provision (1682) “that 
out-plantations , having notice given as abovesaid, shall 
pay their respective rates to the next adjacent constable. ’ ’ 

Here the extension of the political authority of the 
town over a larger territory is followed by a correspond- 
ing addition to the county organization in accordance 
with which this division took its final form. 

Before any steps were taken to subdivide the counties, 
the method of taxation was improved by the enlarge- 
ment of their powers. To tax real and personal prop- 
erty — the latter of which was for the first time taxed 
in this Act under the name of “stocks” — an assessment 
was a preparatory necessity. The constable had thus 
far made the returns, which formed the basis of the 
poll taxes, to the Assembly. But with the county the 
work required a stronger official force. Therefore in 
order that “ the rate be more regularly assessed ” it is 
enacted ‘ ‘ that in each county six men shall be appointed 
to assess and make the rates for the respective counties. ’ ’ f 

Twelve years previous to this, the board of three as- 
sessors for each of the towns was originated. In the 
meantime the towns had been deemed inadequate for 
the work of fiscal administration required by the central 

and S., p. 269. 
fL. and S. pp: 274-5. 


— 14 — 


government. Population was distributed differently 
from what was the case in New England, where the 
town-system or township organization answered the 
purposes of the colonies founded there. In New Jersey 
there was, as in Pennsylvania and partly so in New 
York, a constant tendency in the population to push back 
into the interior, the frontiers of which (New Jersey) 
were not exposed to the hostility of the Indian tribes 
or the French. The inhabitants of New Jersey were 
characteristically agricultural. Yet the conflicting ti- 
tles to land, which had thus been often taken up with- 
out sufficient security, made county courts a necessity. 
From this as a basis the county organization grew. The 
very important addition of the board of assessors to put 
a valuation upon “the lands and stocks” contributed 
to the internal completeness of this intermediate de- 
partment between the provincial government and the 
town with its outlying plantations. 

This same movement in the development of county 
government simplified somewhat the financial arrange- 
ments of this colony. Previously the deputies were paid 
from the provincial treasury. The far-reaching measure 
of 1686, however, empowered each town to make and 
collect rates by which to pay its own representatives. 
Whatever may have been the wisdom, or unwisdom, of 
this Act, it had the effect of throwing a larger measure 
of self-government into the hands of the different di- 
visions of the province as so many political units. 

The county and the town governments from this time 
forth continually made progress in their accessions of 
power from the central government. Internal improve- 
ment began again to be a necessity and the proprietors 
wisely brought it under the work of local authorities. 
Towns were increasing and the means of communica- 
tion between them were very defective. One of the 
last acts of this Assembly (1686) was to empower the 
inhabitants of each town or hamlet or out-plantation to 
choose by virtue of a warrant, to be obtained of a justice 
of the peace of the town, four or five of their number 
to make and lay rates and taxes for maintaining high- 
ways bridges , etc., laid out by the county commis- 


—i5— 


$ioners\ also to levy rates for any other public charge 
within town limits. The levy of this board was subject 
to the revision and approval of the justice of the town 
with the consent of the majority of the board. 

In this act several items are suggestive of growth: 
(i) The joint or mutual responsibility of the board of 
assessors and the justices; (2) the feature of popular 
election of assessors for local taxation. (The board of 
selectmen ordered to be organized by a previous act 
was to levy or assess a provincial tax. Page 13.) And 
the most important of all, (3) the first real instance of 
the co-operation of town and county government in the 
matter of local administration , which for the town was 
now entirely given over by the provincial government. 
The towns had now reached their limit of autonomous 
political action. They had secured, as a voluntary con- 
cession of the proprietary government, all die essentials 
of local self-government. 

Every one of these concessions come to them as an 
essential condition of progress. They were occasioned 
rather than caused by the requirements of taxation. 
The operations of each tax in turn called into frequent 
and wider exercise the granted powers out of which 
there grew a larger and larger measure of confidence in 
their ability to govern themselves. 

This feeling of independence in political action as- 
serted itself in the rejection of a new set of fundamen- 
tal constitutions less liberal than the “concessions”* 
and sent over by the proprietors in England for adop- 
tion. There was a healthy public feeling extant among 
the colonists in East Jersey, else its development could 
not have been so normal. It responded heartily when 
the inevitable race-conflict broke out between the two 
nations rivaling each other for the possession of the con- 
tinent. (1689-1763) 

This war gave fresh impetus to the machinery of tax- 
ation. The combination of the town and county for 
taxing purposes had already been in operation about 
two years, when the French and Indian forces were ad- 
vancing towards Albany (1689). At once the most 


*The ‘‘concessions” were no longer in use, the “Fundamental Constitutions’’ 
of 1682 having superseded them. 


i6— 


comprehensive tax yet was levied to withstand the inva- 
sion. Lands and stocks of all kinds were taxed, and a 
poll tax was levied on resident males of 1 6 years of age 
to meet the expenses of the expedition. 

The method of taxation in the towns was far in ad- 
vance of that of the counties. But dispatch was needed, 
and the King’s letter gave the general alarm. It was 
by this crisis that the office of county commissioners 
was called into being for the levying and collecting of 
the rates thus imposed. The Assembly promptly ap- 
pointed a board of three members for each county in the 
province. 

The want of provincial credit and the lack of individ- 
ual wealth of any large, amount prevented a resort to 
loans. Therefore we find a rare expeditiousness in their 
methods, The constables of the respective towns were 
within a month and a half of the passage of this Act to 
have given to the county commissioners in writing a full 
and true estimate of all the taxable property— -“lands, 
cattle, horses, hogs and heads” — within their respective 
districts. 

Besides the creation of the new office of commissioners 
for the county, this act for the first time gives definite 
limits to the “out-plantations” which in a general way 
had a recognition as a political division as early as 1688 
(see pp. 14-15). This was now, for the time being at 
least, put under the jurisdiction of the constable of the 
respective towns. Eleven districts were thus organ- 
ized out of the towns and the adjoining plantations. 

Previously, taxes had to be delivered to the provincial 
treasurer directly by both counties and towns alike; the 
out-plantation was a political division simply with re- 
spect to local taxation for internal development. In the 
stress of the times, this cumbersome method was set' aside 
by the appointment of a county treasurer in each county, 
by the Assembly, for the reception of taxes at a speci- 
fied place and time. In some counties one and in others 
two were appointed. * The constables made the assess- 
ments the commissioners apportioned the tax and the 

*This did not occur until the war of 1692, however. L,. and S. p. 322-3. 


- 17 - 


treasurers received it. In this method the local justices 
had no part: delinquencies were enforced by the consta- 
ble acting under warrants granted by the commissioners 
at the request of the treasurer. 

Extraordinary as this procedure may seem, it was still 
within constitutional limits, if we may so speak, of the 
practices of the legislative powers in the province. The 
management of the system of officials added to the effi- 
ciency of the exercise of power granted to them. The 
county commissioners hereafter receive the returns of 
the assessors instead of their being sent to the courts of 
quarter sessions in the respective counties. We have to 
notice here the gradual disengagement of the judicial 
and the executive functions in local government, a sep- 
aration gradually taking place without violence or 
struggle and deemed as an essential feature of any 
form of sound self-government. 

Already only one decade had passed since the prov- 
ince was divided into counties, and the towns made to 
include the out-plantations. This simultaneous process 
from two independent centres of growth soon worked 
itself out by the natural course of pn gress in iuternal 
organization with these limits. One by one new fea- 
tures were added: first the assessor, then the collectors and 
finally the treasurer. Though the town was older in its 
experience than the county, the methods of taxation 
were nearly the same in each. 

The operations of these methods served meanwhile to 
reveal their defects. The widening of populated areas 
of country called for a more minute organization in the 
case of the counties.- The corresponding prosperity in- 
creased the labors of their constables so that the out- 
plantations were most likely to be slighted in carrying 
out measures of taxation. 

Several statutes prove this to have been the situation 
in 1692. An act for the raising of an excise tax on 
strong drink and for the regulation of ordinaries, some 
of which had originally been legislated into existence, 
led to the amplification of the duties of the county offi- 
cial, called the treasurer, and a change in the method 
of appointment. This officer, formerly appointed by 
the Assembly, was now first nominated and appointed 


— 18— 




by the justices of the county courts in the respective 
counties. By this transfer there was occasioned a con- 
siderable enlargement of the functions of both of these 
county officials in the exercise of which they were mu- 
tually dependent. The Excise Act imposed the work of 
collecting the excise tax and licenses for the whole 
county upon the treasurer. This was no light task, in 
view of the fact that illicit retailing of liquors might 
be found anywhere, regardless of anything except the 
natural law of competition to prevent it.* Retailers in 
public houses continue to defraud the commonwealth, 
whose laxness in enforcing its excise licenses was 
equalled by its inability to collect its revenues. To 
bring the numerous prosecutions into the courts in- 
creased the labors of the treasurer therefore beyond his 
capacity as well as multiplied the work of the justices 
of the county courts before whom alone these cases were 
to be tried, and by whom the price of liquors was fixed 
for the retail trade, f 

The other measure, the war- tax of 1688, had been a 
failure, though levied in the midst of much enthusiasm 
for the cause for which it was meant. It was doomed 
by the extraordinary range of its application; after a trial 
of four years the levy was finally repealed. Yet the 
French and Indian troops hung as ominiously near as 
ever on the frontiers of New York. 

But each successive addition to the duties of county 
officials for the regulation of its internal affairs or to 
collect the provincial tax only revealed the more clearly 
the limitations of county government. The methods of 
taxation in vogue were good in themselves, but failed 
when applied to so large a territory. Nevertheless the 
central power, disposed as it was to contract its own 
range of action by widening that of the local divisions, 
continued to delegate new and onerous duties upon both 
town and county, and in particular the latter, until its 
undivided organization was burdened beyond its capaci- 
ty to act. 

A few days after the repeal of the old war-tax a new 

*L. and S., p. 318. 

fly. and S., p. 319. 


- 19 - 

bill for raising funds to help carry on the war was pre- 
sented. This was not offered however, without some 
idea of change in the method of collection; on the fol- 
lowing day the necessary and proper step was taken, a 
step of pre-eminent importance in the historical elabor- 
ation of local Government in the state: a bill for the di- 
vision of each county into townships passed both houses. * 

Between the aims and methods of government there is 
too often a world of difference. Here there seems to be 
a gratifying harmony. The wisdom of what to do is 
thus plainly expressed by this legislature of farmers: 
u Whereas several things is to be done by the inhabi- 
tants of Towns, Tribes or divisions within each County, 
as chusing of -Deputies, Constables, &c., taxing and 
collecting of several rates for public uses &c. ; * * * ; 

and whereas a great many settlements are not reckoned 
within any such town or division, nor the bounds of the 
reputed towns ascertained by means whereof the respec- 
tive constables know not their districts and many other 
inconveniencies arising from thence” — therefore a new 
sub-division is made, at first and for a few years only 
geographical, but which in no great while began to have 
a political individuality as the fundamental unit of local 
self-government. 

In the meantime, the town and county governments 
continued to act in harmony. In 1693, the assessors of 
the former met the justices of the latter to adjust the 
county finances equally and fairly. In 1698, a still more 
important act empowers the people of the towns to elect 
a board of three assessors on the same day on which the 
provincial reprensentati ves are elected. This union of 
the now inseparable ideas of representation and taxation 
is of more than apparent interest and importance. It is 
the beginning of a practice which repeated itself until 
the principle under which it fell became a living law in 
the political life of the colonies. 

Gradually the process of the differentiation of the local 
official duties proceeded. In 1794, the county treasurer 
was separated from the collectorship and in 1798 the 
work of assessing in the towns was taken from the duties 


♦Record of Governor and Council of N. J., p. 158. 


— 20 — 


of the constable. The envied material prosperity which 
invited many immigrants from the other colonies, pre- 
pared, and the resistance offered to New York in the at- 
tempt to impose duties upon vessels entering at ports of 
New Jersey, precipitated the long-standing quarrel be- 
tween the two provinces, and thus brought the proprie- 
tary period to a close. This and other events had hast- 
ened the tendency to centralization which appeared in 
the government of the colonies, both North and South, 
toward the close of the 17th century. 

It was well, too, that it came no earlier. The time 
had been given for the problem of local government to 
solve itself, and that too within the brief period of thirty 
years. The limits of its expansion were reached, and 
the attitude of the proprietary government had through- 
out interfered little, if at all, with the course of events 
favoring this expansion of the town with its few officers, 
and then the growth of the county system of officers, 
and soon in providing that the county and the town 
should b'e relieved of part of their burdens by the erec- 
tion of the important political division, the township. 
The wisdom of not abandoning the county for the town- 
ship was due to the course of events and to the circum- 
stances of the time: the county government was the 
only one existing when the township was spoken of first, 
excepting of course the chartered town. We must at- 
tribute much of this evolution to the situation into 
which the people were thrown and to the absence of 
the proprietary owners, who by non-interference through- 
out favored the development politically, much like the 
government of the first two Georges had favored the in- 
dustrial expansion of England — by leaving it alone. 
The establishment oi a royal colonial government would 
not undo it The townships, though surveyed and 
serving only to fix residence, were organized politically 
during the following period of royal administration, as 
population spread and settlements multiplied. 

This system of taxation, which is like a necessary 
part of the texture in the fabric of local government as 
well as of provincial, was thoroughly established in 
New Jersey by the time the mother country began to 
shift the burdens and debts of European wars and of an 


— 21 — 


extravagant aristocracy upon the prosperous colonies in 
the West — colonies which had largely thus far cared for 
themselves. The period of royal government did prac- 
tically nothing but carry out the logical consequences of 
the system of taxation found at the proprietary surrender. 

At the time of the passage of the Stamp Act the fol- 
lowing principles of taxation had become ingrained into 
the political polity of this province: 

1. Taxes were laid only through the representatives 
of the people from whom they were to be collected. 

2. The sums thus accruing were disposed of by 'the 
representatives whose constituents had paid them. 

3. The use of the public funds had to be specified 
particularly in the enactment, both in the laying and 
the disbursing of rates. 

4. The initiative in taxation invariably lay in the 
representatives of the people; never in the proprietary 
body nor in the Duke of York nor in the sovereign, who 
previous to the Stamp Act only claimed a veto upon the 
legislation of the province. 

5. The assessment and collection of taxes was inva- 
riably successfully performed only by local (resident) 
officers. * 

6. The amount of taxes was to be no more than the 
needs of the government required. 

These principles of practice and the Stamp Act were 
too radically unlike in their spirit and meaning to live 
together. The former made the Revolution inevitable; 
the latter was the occasion of it, though not immediately 
so. So utterly at variance with the life and institutions 
of these provincials, any attempt to enforce the Stamp 
Act must appear as deliberate tyranny to them. They 
felt, thought and were schooled by experience as En- 
glishmen: they could not understand differently. Had 
they been Milanese or Neapolitans, as William of Orange 
wrote Philip II, such a compliance might have been, 
reasonably expected; but as they w’ere Englishmen 
whose fathers had dethroned kings for acts which had 
their origin in the same kind of violations of individual 
liberty, it was impossible: nature and history were too 
strong for personal monarchy to triumph over them. 


♦The towns of Shrewsbury and Middletown received the provincial delegates 
rather as embassadors than as collectors, without yielding. 
































































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